I hear some people have unnatural fears of unplugging while they are on vacation. They are so afraid they will miss something. During my week-long vacation to Israel, I rarely checked work email and felt no real responsibility to check in otherwise but occasionally took a few minutes during a long, quiet bus ride to check in thanks to the driver Saher turning his iPhone into a hotspot.

That’s when it happened. I’d check my email, Facebook & twitter mentions, and see if family or friends were on IM. I rarely scanned feeds to see what was happening, assuming someone would get in touch with me directly if something important was going on. And in fact they did!

• Jesse R. Bussard (Twitter & blog) was among the first. She alerted me to an NPR piece on cotton and the fact that maybe folks looking for a high tech job should think about cotton. The piece talks about while the Silicon Valley & Boston’s biotech businesses may get attention, working in a greenhouse with cotton is among the high tech jobs in the marketplace.
• Maru Whitmore (Twitter & blog) was nice enough to flag a CNN Mexico piece about cotton. Since it is in SPanish, I’m thankful for Maru’s explanation she gave me “More links!!! This is a good one! Talks about how GMO cotton seeds need less water to produce more cotton. ‘The dark side of organic cotton.'”
• Brent Boersma (Twitter & now blogging) highlighted the Wired article that gets a mention in the NPR piece. I love the graphic text that says “Blue collar jobs have taken a beating, but what remains of them is more sophisticated, more skilled. And cotton — spur to the first Industrial Revolution — is once again leading the way.
• Another friend has tempted me about having taken photos of a cotton koozie at the Indy 500…. I await the follow-up with great interest!

The post Community Keeps Me Up-to-Speed on Cotton During My Vacation appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Appreciate Marshall Sigsby giving me & another cotton tweep down our way — Jeremy Bullington from the University of Arkansas Extension Service a couple of harvest time shout outs. Seems like years ago we finished harvest — in record time I am happy to say!

The photo below is of photo below is a beautiful field near Rector, Arkansas. You can see yields were pretty good — just look how white the field looks where the picker is versus the part of the field to the left where the picker has already harvested the lint! I linked the photo directly to its original online post — by going there you can also see other photos Marshall’s posted.

For additional insight into cotton harvest, I have a post that shows the on-board baling moduler at work and others on the topic of cotton harvest in my Cotton 101 series.

The post Arkansas Cotton Harvest October 2010 — Friend’s Photo from Marshall Sigsby appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

In my Cotton 101 series, I wrote a blog post about getting modules from the field to the gin. I love seeing them so I was thrilled when Anna-Lisa Giannini told me trucks were still on the move in her part of the Texas Panhandle. There are a few things that a cotton geek like me notices:

• Look at the horizon. I love it! Not a tree nor hill to be seen. That’s so similar to the the Plains area I called home for my college years! (Enid, Oklahoma for those who don’t know. And Enid really is fairly close to where this was taken.)
• I love that you clearly can see that the truck is bound for the Adobe Walls Gin. It even gives the gin’s phone number on the module cover! So easy to find out the gin is in Spearman, Texas which is incredibly close to the Oklahoma state line. Cotton has grown in this northern High Plains area over the last few years as better adapted varieties have been introduced.
• The farm has labeled it as 555 which is either the farm ID number or the module. Not sure but I love seeing the number as it brings to mind it is most likely not the variety — cause “triple nickel” was adapted for full-season areas and wouldn’t do too well in an area with such a short summer.
• It LOOKS like Anna-Lisa took the photo when stopped to cross Highway 136.

I love that I got a new Friend’s Photo to feature so soon after I started the series! Never would have guessed it! But I have a few others sent recently that I want to share in the near future too.

The post Taking a Module to the Adobe Walls Gin — Friend’s Photo by Anna-Lisa Giannini appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

One of the great things about the awesome network of online friends I have is that occasionally, out of nowhere, I get a photo tweeted or Facebooked to me just because it makes them think about me and/or agriculture. I realize I’ve lost track of the bulk of these photos that clearly show the presence of  agriculture in our daily lives. I got the idea as I was walking through the mall today and saw a shirt that was somewhat like the one below that Amanda Sollman saw in Las Vegas this week (you can read about why she was there in this post on her blog). Amanda’s tweet was simple & to the point:

https://twitter.com/#!/sollmana/status/10151453385564160

Thanks Amanda for sharing the cotton message someone from Clemson University’s school of agriculture was wearing in Vegas! I hope to have more cotton & agriculture love from friends to share on my blog in the future as well. When posting to Twitter, I’ll use the #friendsphoto hashtag too… I’m thinking others who blog about rather specific areas may want to do this. Not only is it another way to amplify your message, but it’s fantastic to think about having a series of photos from various friends stacking up digitally!

The post Starting a New Series — Friend’s Photo — First One is from Amanda Sollman appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

It’s Friday night and I’m listening to the rain come down.  So nice to be home.  I put my feet up & decided to catch up on what’s been going on in the digital week.  I saw a tweet from a farmer I talk to a good bit — “Waiter at Famous Daves has T-shirt that says ‘my job is a pork by-product'” — I LOVED IT!  And I had to send it along with a note from me — “AWESOME! My job is a farm by-product.”

Obviously the idea resonated with a few folks online as some of them decided to forward it along and then April Bowman said I should get a t-shirt! All I thought was why not and next thing I knew, I had designed a t-shirt on zazzle (thanks Andy for the inspiration of the shirt you did this summer).

I’ve ordered myself one and set it up so that if anyone else wants one, you can pick the style & size you’d like.  Just go to the website here to buy one yourself!  Here’s what mine looks like (of course its cotton)!

The service I used is set up where if you make a design & share it, there is a royalty of 10 percent or more. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off but then after thinking about it a few minutes, I decided I could simply turn any royalties that come in over to the AgChat Foundation — seems a great connection!  Farmers empower me to have a job, and a shirt that expresses that will help support the organization empowering more farmers to tell their stories through social media.

The post My Job is a Farm By-Product (the t-shirt) appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.